The Answerability Index
Every system organizes the same eight functions: power, access, feedback, agency, care, accountability, repair, and adaptation. No system invents them, and none escapes them. A friendship organizes power. A workplace controls access. A family decides whose feedback matters. A constitution determines how care is carried, who can act, who answers for harm, whether repair is possible, and whether the structure can change when it fails. The question is how each function is organized.
Under dominion logic, the function serves control and answers upward. Information moves toward authority. Permission moves away from it. Care can be withheld, and accountability often protects the hierarchy more than it constrains it. Under relational logic, the function remains answerable to the people living with its effects. Feedback has somewhere to go. Agency can alter outcomes. Harm creates an obligation to answer and repair.
No system is one thing all the way through. A workplace can distribute power and ration care. A family can listen well and repair nothing. A constitution can build feedback into its structure while leaving accountability dependent on whoever holds office. Reduce that system to a single score and the contradiction disappears into an average. Eight spokes keep it visible.
That is why the shape matters more than the score. A wheel with care near the outer edge and accountability near the center tells you more than a high average ever could. The system may feel sustaining to the people inside it while leaving harm unanswered. The unevenness is the finding.
Tap a function to score it from its anchors. Drag a point for finer placement.
How a system gets its shape
A wheel does not arrive with its shape. Every shape is the residue of the same loop, run over and over, until the pattern hardens into structure.
Rupture is intrinsic to relation because rupture is difference. Any action changes the field of relation. It carries care toward someone, away from someone else, or unevenly across both. The difference does not begin with harm. It begins wherever effects, needs, meanings, or positions diverge.
What matters is how the system responds to that difference. A system that repairs transformatively builds one architecture. A system that repeatedly chooses the cheapest available repair builds another. Run the loop long enough and those accumulated responses become the thing you just plotted.